Books: Epic Terror

• Share

A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE by Alistair Horne Viking; 604 pages; $19.95

All Saints' Day, a Christian feast that commemorates the spiritual heroism of the early martyrs, has a double significance to the French. With a canny sense of symbolism, Algeria's fledgling Front de Libération Nationale (F.L.N.) chose Nov. 1, 1954, as the day to launch its rebellion. In the wintry mountains of the Aurès, Muslim djounoud (soldiers of the faith) attacked a police station at Biskra, wounding two gendarmes. At Khenchela, a lieutenant, Gérard Darneau, was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire—the first French officer to die in the conflict.

The troubles in Algeria were barely noted in Paris newspapers, even though an F.L.N. proclamation of the struggle for independence was broadcast by Cairo radio and circulated in pamphlets throughout the country. Nonetheless, the All Saints' uprising—swiftly followed by savage reprisals against Algeria's Muslim majority—marked the beginning of a bloody conflict that lasted for nearly eight years. It led to the birth of a new republic and the eradication of the French presence in North Africa. But at what a cost! According to Algerian figures, as many as 1 million Muslims died during and after the war. French casualties, military and civilian, are estimated at 27,000 killed and some 65,000 injured. When the end came, a terrible exodus began. Forced to choose between "the suitcase or the coffin," nearly 1 million white pied noir settlers tearfully abandoned their homeland. For more than a century it had been considered as much a part of France as Brittany or Provence.

As A Savage War of Peace notes, France's involvement with Algeria proved more trap than treasure from the beginning. Armies of the Bourbon King Charles X first laid claim to the old Barbary coast in 1830; in 1847 Algeria was formally incorporated into France as three huge departments. The white colons were French citizens; the native Muslims were merely residents, subject to taxes and military service but with very limited voting privileges. From time to time, men of good will suggested various ways of expanding Muslim rights, only to see the reforms rejected by the pieds noirs and their archconservative allies in Paris.

Algeria was the last colonial war, although, as Author Horne observes, the situation that created it has certain parallels to Rhodesia and South Africa. Embittered by its recent defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French army was determined not to let it happen in Algeria, and twice the war was nearly won. In 1957 the feared paratroopers of General Jacques Massu, using torture on a scale that shocked and sickened Frenchmen, destroyed the F.L.N. underground network during the Battle of Algiers. Two years later, punishing French raids shattered the morale of starving, undersupplied F.L.N. units in rural strongholds.

Many of the cadres seemed ready to sue for peace. With some justice, French commanders complained that decisive thrusts against the F.L.N. were frustrated by the waffling of politicians in Paris. Thus the generals had plotted to undermine the rudderless Fourth Republic and restore De Gaulle to power.